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Game on for rugby girls

Playoffs kick off Saturday for St. Albert

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St. Albert’s queens of the pitch are playing their best rugby of the year at the right time.

They kick off the second division playoffs Saturday with two wins in a row after a season-opening nine losses.

“We’re going into the playoffs with more confidence. We know that we can beat anybody now,” said standoff Katie Davis after Monday’s hard-fought 14-12 victory against Leduc Crude/West at the St. Albert Rugby Football Club.

St. Albert is expected to play the Pirates in the semifinal round. Game time is 2 p.m. at the Pirates Rugby Club. Last month, the Pirates handed the St. Albert its ninth loss, 10-7. Since then, St. Albert defeated the winless Grande Prairie Sirens 34-22 and, three weeks later, hung tough against a physical Leduc side.

“It’s big to win two in row,” Davis said. “We take every effort, whether it’s a win or a loss, in stride and we just go from there and build off it. This is what we need to do to come out on top and we know we can do it with all the training we do.”

In the five-team Edmonton Rugby Union fixtures, St. Albert tied Leduc (4-7 overall) for third place at 2-2. The Pirates (4-7 overall) and Strathcona Druids 2 (6-5 overall) shared top spot at 3-1.

“We had a tough pre-season [0-7 spring league record] and a tough first couple of [second division] games but we’ve just built off it and learned,” Davis said.

After a scoreless opening 40 minutes, St. Albert battled back from a five-point deficit with converted tries on runs by Marcia Davis and Jen Newman.

“It was a good game. We had a couple of rough moments where it got a bit sloppy but we recovered and we fought hard to the end,” said Davis, who converted both tries. “We didn’t let little things like bad reffing and knocked-on balls and some bad rough plays get to us. We kept fighting and it showed at the end.”

In the first half, a gallant defensive stand for several minutes kept Leduc from crossing the try line. St. Albert withstood a barrage of crash balls by Leduc’s bigger but slower forwards with fierce determination at the point of contact.

The closest St. Albert came to scoring in the first half ended with a penalty at the Leduc five-metre line with seven minutes left until the break.

The forward-dominated half saw both teams struggle for yardage after intense pressure by Leduc early in the match.

Ten minutes into the second half, Leduc stole a lineout ball inside the 22-metre line and drove St. Albert back towards the try area and before punching through the defensive line.

Five minutes later, after Leduc turned the ball over in its end off the kickoff following the try, the fleet-footed Marcia Davis found space down the right side, motoring out of the back for a try under the posts.

A few minutes after the try, St. Albert almost scored again but Caitlin Pon was tackled short of the try line near the corner flag.

With momentum on their side, St. Albert struck again as Marcia Davis fed Jen Newman the ball in front of the 22-metre line and the left-winger ran like the wind for five points.

On both tries, Leduc had trouble with St. Albert’s ball-handing skills and aggressive running.

“It comes down to training. We had a bit of a break [between games] so we were able to work on our game play. We worked on our phase of play and what we wanted to do with our pattern and we really stuck to it today,” said Davis, who aced the difficult conversion after Newman’s try.

Leduc added its second try with 16 minutes remaining after winning a St. Albert scrum.

After a close call by St. Albert in Leduc’s end, the visitors ramped up the pressure but were held in check by a swarming defence.

St. Albert’s gritty pack of forwards, led by Sabrina Kelly and Megan Lauer, refused to wilt with the game on the line.

“We talked about how we never want to give up and that’s become our mentality; let’s put a little bit of pride into this and just go to the end and make sure we never give up on anything,” said Davis, 20, a high school rugby product of the Bellerose Bulldogs who spent six months with the Manchester Rugby Club before returning to St. Albert at the end of April.